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A very interesting talk at EVA 2017 from Jon McCormack. He discussed three criticisms of generative art: 1. ‘algorithmic genericism’: ‘works made with similar generative procedures – even by different artists – possess a certain generic and repetitive character.’ He used the Voronoi algorithm as an example of a technique which is becoming too familiar.…

Platforms 2 Yesterday I went to a workshop at LSE on ‘Digital Platforms’. This considered the theory behind social platforms such as Twiter and also the Apple apps store. Dr Kevin Boudreau spoke about the economics of app development and hosting on the Apple platform. His argument was that this platform provides a very low…

The period from 1275 to 1325 saw as great an intellectual revolution as the years 1875 – 1925 (Freud, Marx, Einstein, Wittgenstein, Goedel, Cubism, etc..) – that’s the argument of a book I bought on impulse a while ago, and have only just got round to reading. The Measure of Reality by Alfred W Crosby…

The Canary links to a story in the Daily Express of 19 January. The Canary headline is “This story went viral, yet the German Chancellor’s office confirms The Express fabricated the whole thing”. In effect the Express sub-editors have taken a fairly anodyne report and headed it: “UK and USA are WEAK: Angela Merkel calls…

Lev Manovich lists two types of digitally altered reality: virtual reality and augmented reality. He defines the latter as ” the laying of dynamic and context-specific information over the visual field of a user”. Two lectures yesterday at the Alan Turing Institute on smart cities, by Prof Phil Blythe and Prof Sir Alan Wilson make…

(This posting is culled mostly from two reports in Bloomberg, here and here. To save hyperlinking I have not repeated the citations everywhere.) Bloomberg said: “To outsiders, the Trump campaign often appears to be powered by little more than the candidate’s impulses and Twitter feed.” However, Bloomberg reporting makes clear that there was a serious…